Matthew Simms
Dr. Simms is a specialist in European and North American Art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with additional expertise in post-war California art. He has published widely on French modern art, from Antoine-Louis Barye to Paul Cézanne, and more recently on the art and careers of Southern California artists Robert Irwin, Helen Pashgian, and Ed Bereal. His articles, reviews, and notes have appeared in the following peer-reviewed journals: Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Art History, caa.reviews, Chinati Foundation Newsletter, History of Photography, Journal of the Archives of American Art, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Oxford Art Journal, Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, The Brooklyn Rail, Women’s Art Journal, and Word and Image. He has chapters in exhibition catalogues published by Princeton University Art Museum (2002, 2014), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2016), Budapest Museum of Fine Arts (2017), DeYoung Museum (2018), Kunstmuseum Basel (2018), Whatcom Museum (2019), and the Chinati Foundation (2019). Dr. Simms maintains an interest in contemporary art and has published on Brian Wills, Nick Terry, Mark Ruwedel, and Tobias Pils. Recently, he was project advisor and contributor to KCET’s Artbound episode, “Light & Space” (Season 11, Episode 1, 2020).
Dr. Simms also holds the position of Gerald and Bente Buck West Coast Collector for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. In this capacity, he helps artists and galleries organize and donate papers, and also conducts oral history interviews. He has collected the papers of, among other artists, Ronald Davis, Ilene Segalove, Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, Eduardo Carrillo, Tony DeLap, Charles Arnoldi, Chiura Obata, Tom Marioni, Roland Reiss, Masami Teraoka, Astrid Preston, Richard Duardo, and Stanton MacDonald-Wright.
- PhD, Harvard University, 1998
- MA, University of Rochester, 1994
- BA, Univeristy of California—Santa Cruz, 1990
Cézanne’s Watercolors: Between Drawing and Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
Robert Irwin: A Conditional Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
Helen Pashgian: Fractured Light (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming).
Robert Irwin: Notes Toward a Conditional Art (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2011).
Robert Irwin: Site Determined. Exh. cat. (DelMonico Prestel, 2018).
The Los Angeles Tapes: Alan Solomon’s Interviews with Kauffman, Bell, Turrell, and Irwin (Smithsonian/Circle, 2018).
The New York Tapes: Alan Solomon’s Interviews with Warhol, Stella, Rauschenberg, and Others (Smithsonian/Circle, forthcoming).
Robert Irwin: Site Determined. University Art Museum, CSULB (Jan. 28-April 15, 2018) and Hazel and Robert Seigel Gallery, Pratt Institute (Sept. 1-Nov. 30, 2018).
